Happy new year and the best wishes for 2019!

To celebrate this new year I have created digital fireworks that is viewable in VR.  I wanted to create something like this for a little while, but this year I got the idea, in time, in my head and finished it before december even began.

The graphics and animation are made with the free and open source software blender, version 2.79.
It is rendered at 2048×4096 for each eye with cycles at the default sample setting of 128. The output was frames like the one below, but a little bigger,
4096×4096 pixels. The maximum supported for the oculus go headset I read.

The little piece of background music is created with, the free for desktop software, sunvox. When I was thinking about the music I wanted to have an electronic style sound, the default start setup with a few tweaks was perfect for this. The tiny fragment is composed in E Lydian mode, for a cheerful atmosphere.

For the Blender part I watched and used parts of the following tutorials:

Drivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJJJpWcxp0o
Follow path: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/21041/change-start-time-of-camera-following-a-path  
Panoramic background: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5681/add-a-panoramic-background-to-scene-in-cycles
Fireworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df9LGwBg91A , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWFnGovX_tU  , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9vceDdTufo
Stereo 360: https://youtu.be/FqPbYWsVLK0, https://medium.com/@warrenfrancis/how-to-create-vr-video-in-blender-840034f2996c

The stars background was created with a  free plugin, Procedural Nebula, without the Nebula  

The video editing was solely done in Blender, the fireworks and explosion sounds are all coming from humble bundles (recent game development and unity bundles)

After rendering the stereo 360 video file, the spatial media injector from google was used to insert the spherical spatial info and encode it as stereoscopic 3D.

2018 was a pretty good year for me, following lots of tutorials, playing and thinkering with Blender and the Godot game engine.

Both free software packages are already in a really pleasant state to work with, but 2019 will bring enormous enhancements to both that will improve them even more.

For supporting the development of blender 2.8 I bought the little rocket usb stick of course.

I’m really looking forward to using the new EEVEE renderer in the upcoming blender that will reduce render times vastly, but can still produce really nice 3D images and video. The grease pencil 2D animation is another feature I’m also absolutely looking forward to. Creating 2D animation in a 3D environment I’m comfortable working in, opens a lot of possibilities. After being an Adobe Flash guy for a long time, this will become my new tool for creating 2D animation I think. For the new year in 2017 I’ve already made a small animation with it, testing the grease pencil included in Blender 2.77, with shape tweens, which was already pretty cool and the newer version, included in blender  2.8, promises to be even better. Shape tweens will again be included I heard.

Here’s the small testing thing I made for new year 2017 with the grease pencil that was included in blender back then, I only published it on facebook until now:

https://ictbram.com/ZentangleAni/zentangle-animation-16/ was my first experiment with grease pencil. I started working on a pretty complex zentangle animation after that. I did not yet finish it, due to other priorities, nevertheless, I did really like the grease pencil animation toolset and workflow.

I got myself a blender Cloud subscription. For supporting blender, but as well to have access to the collection of courses and materials on there. The scripting for artists course was the thing that convinced me in the end to do so. Great course, I knew already everything is accessible with python in Blender, but here I learned in practice how to program animation that you can save or alter by hand later on, in the blend files, awesome.

Meanwhile Blender 2.8 has gotten in to beta stage and will be released in 2019.

The release of Godot 3.1 is taking a bit longer then I was thinking in my previous blog post, but it’s getting close as well. They are almost in beta stage. Version 3 is already fun to work with, but the optional typing in gdscript code and OpenGL ES 2.0 rendering to have publishing power to older devices will bring even more joy since I have a few older devices laying around and love good code completion.

I’ve become a patreon with a small contribution to this project because it’s so nice and keeps getting better with this support. Any extra support for this great project would be a good thing, so if you would like to help yourself for creating games with godot or just want to support everyone else creating cool games with this marvelous piece of free software, please consider donating, you can have your name in the credits, a company logo on their website.

The documentation and quantity of good tutorials for Godot is rising. I supported the kickstarter of Ben & Yann for creating a course which turned out wonderful and I recommend if you want to start learning Godot.

So far I did not publish games with version 3 of Godot, but I did create a few prototypes and made some tools with it. Including something to compose images, a tool to connect to https behind a login, writing config files. I’m a fan already. Finally a good, no to hard, cross-platform, development tool for creating all kinds of interactive multimedia apps quickly, where the sources fit well in a version control system, so that it’s no problem switching machines constantly, like I always have to do, to get something done

** Update 31/01/2019

A glitch entered my online version at the very last moment. One ball, that explodes into particles, had still a wrong, white material. That one was an exception to the rest of my exploding ball meshes, the others have a black material, it was the result of trying a few things with the used tutorials. I finished the animation before december started almost completely, but I wanted to do something extra in the end. Due to circumstances this had to be done really quickly towards new year’s eve and I thought of alternating a frame with the stars and a frame with 2019 on it, to have a better ending, very rapidly, quickfix. Sadly I chose a frame with that white ball on it. I only noticed it on new year’s day and tried to fix it with the youtube video editor by cutting some frames. You can do this with normal video in the online editor that’s still in beta, but cutting frames dit not work with a 360 VR video. It got an error: “There was a problem in processing your video. As a result your recent edits were not saved” so I left it for a while, but this is such a glitch, it ruins the whole thing, so I fixed it in the past few days, that the animation shows like it should and changed the video in my blogpost today. Changing the video results of course in losing the enormous 144 views, they are not on the new video. I’m keeping the old one online, as a reminder, always prepare and review 100% of the project at ease before publishing, if the circumstances permit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-44RU98EZs

I’ve used blender 3D to design the model and got it printed at 3dprintfactory.me in Antwerp. The cost was 17.5 euro in total, 10 euro for setting up and 75 cent per gram for printing.
Preparing the model in Blender was not that hard. I looked at some info online for 3D printing with blender: http://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/prepping_blender_files_for_3d_printing and http://www.sculpteo.com/en/prepare-your-model-3d-printing-blender
On the first link they say to check for manifolds with shift-ctrl-alt m in edit mode and on the second link they say to do a boolean operation for connecting 2 objects.
I checked for manfolds, corrected a thing, converted the text to a mesh, joined the text ictbram and the object with a boolean modifier.
I contacted 3dprintfactory. They instructed me to bring the model in .STL format. That’s simple with blender, just choose to export to that format.
Apparently it’s best the object is completely flat on the bottom, that makes sense, but I didn’t know that. My model got a thickness difference if it lays on the side that’s best for the print. For supporting the model when printing, a bridge is also printed to correct that difference. That bridge is the same material, it can be removed, but removing that always leaves traces.

In the evening I opened a few coke bottles, but regrettable, the material is not hard enough. Opening the bottles has left some marks on my opener as you can see. Oh well, It was my first try at 3d printing and I learned some things.

At 3dprintfactory I got 2 software tips for correcting and checking 3D models for printing:
Meshlab and netfabb 

** Update 01/09/2015

A few days after printing I noticed it’s possible to do stainless steal 3d prints with shapeways and they gave free shipping in august.

I’ve made it a bit smaller, flat on the bottom and the result is good. It still works great and stainless steal is a nice material for this.

If you want it, you can order it here. This is a personal experiment. I do not have a business and can not accept payments. The price of the item is only for shapeways, but I still would like people buying it because it has my brandname on it
Only buy if you have money to spare, 31.74 euro + shipping is a bit expensive for a bottle opener I think.

Or print it yourself:
You can download the .blend file for Blender and the .stl file I sent to shapeways. The dimensions I choose were :

Smaller dimensions won’t give a functional model anymore.

The app is also made in flash with adobe air  and the Starling game engine. It is compatible with the webversion where it is possible to add computer players. They play by the rules, but just choose random cards. You can test or learn the game with the computer players, but you should play against real players.

The game uses the server software and library, union wich is installed on a raspberry pi at my home. The language of the game is Dutch.
There are some screenshots on http://ictbram.be/wiezen/android.html

I’ve also made a little promotion video with friends and family playing the game:

The video is created with the great free software package blender. This software is mainly for making 3D movies and images, but has a nice build in video editor as well.

The little star animation and credits were too made with blender.

http://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/06/two-point-motion-tracking/

First, I followed the tutorial with his footage. It was a good tutorial and not that hard. Being a starwars fan and blender enthusiast I could not resist of doing this with my own video. It’s just a few seconds, but hey, I’ve got my own lightsaber to show for now

Soon, there will be a promotion action and the plan is that clients can fish a discount ball out of a bowl.
This week I’ve made a visualisation that can be used to promote that campaign on the website.
The picture was taken in the showroom. The bowl and balls are made in Blender with Cycles.
I received the logo of qtrex in pdf, but the color of the text had to be changed to black.
So I thought of using Inkscape.
With an import from Inkscape the result was good, but I was missing some fonts.
Using the following command under linux I found the names of them:
strings qtrex\ logo_11.pdf | grep FontName
Thankfully they were all freely downloadable and afer I’ve installed them, the logo imported properly in Inkscape and was editable.

I’m pleased with the result and the fact that everything was made, using free, open source software:

Blender 
Inkscape 
Gimp 
Ubuntu linux 

https://ictbram.com/starfighter/

Blender, Gimp and Adobe Flash were used to create the graphics.
Flixel as the game engine, As3sfxr for the sound effects and the free version of FDT for coding.

This one does play on mobile devices:

There is more information about this on the following website: http://ictbram.be/wiezen
Everything is written in Dutch.

I made this little movie with blender about how the cards are distributed: